by Angel Payne
Shay cued up a vision of his own heaven, girding his mind and soul with it in this eerie moment filled only with his breath and the wind. Her indigo eyes, thick with passion. Her exotic lips, parted on her climax. Her open arms and burnished nudity, given so fully and beautifully to him.
He’d know that heaven again. Soon. He swore it with every fiber of his being.
I’m not going to die, dancer. Neither is Tait. Understood?
Her answering smile spread across his mind like a rainbow, helping him brace against the November wind that gashed down again from the mountains. It was a double scythe on this plain, gusting from the ranges on both sides and then converging into a blade straight down the camp’s main road to cut through every layer of his head-to-toe white Gore-Tex.
White. Shit. While he understood Homer’s mandate, he fucking hated it. The white made it impossible for him to blend with any of the landscape around here. On the other hand, it made him look like goddamn Storm Shadow—not his favorite GI Joe on the planet, if that was what they even considered the guy. He’d take Duke Hauser any day. Duke would refuse to go into an op in white anything, except his BVDs.
Sorry, Duke…but I’m doing this for a cause higher than you or me.
The wind whipped up again. Shay would’ve raised a middle finger to the mountains in retaliation, but he was damn grateful for those cliffs right now. They’d made it possible for the team to bribe a Grand Canyon sky tour pilot into changing up his course by a few miles and then letting them gang-bang it out in a jump that had Hawk and Zeke instantly begging for a do-over once they’d all gathered their chutes. Hours of crossed fingers had followed the jump, everyone hoping that Homer and his band of merry men didn’t have radar sophisticated enough to notice their “creative” in-fil to the area. Since everything went smoothly when Shay met Homer’s driver-cum-henchman at the front entrance of the Bellagio, climbing into the town car just as the crowd ooo’ed and ahhh’ed at the first morning performance of the hotel’s famous fountains, the group paused for a small but short celebration over the radio. First hurdle cleared.
By that point, Franz had led the team over miles of harsh terrain, still with a few left to go before they could rest in their ready positions for this exact moment.
The meeting they’d been preparing for.
Shay swallowed in an attempt to rewet his throat. Briefly wiggled the tips of his fingers, though he had no gun or knife to reach for. Homer’s instructions were specific. He came alone in the town car. He wore the damn ninja outfit and nothing else.
He only thanked fucking fate that the driver goon was an amateur. Though the ape had been thorough about the frisking shit back at the Bellagio, he never thought to scrape Shay’s ears for comm pieces. Didn’t really matter since Double-O had insisted on supergluing a backup piece straight onto his scalp, then securing it by winding his hair around the base. That process had been as comfortable as a root canal.
“I’ve got eyes on I-Man.” The voice, down to a whisper, was Ethan. “Repeat, eyes on I-Man but nobody else.”
“Check,” Zeke responded. “Nothing from our bird’s nest, eith—wait. Cocksucker at two o’clock.”
“Check,” Hawk growled. “I’ve got him too, Zsycho.”
Shay appreciated the confirmations, but they weren’t necessary. From the second Homer stepped out onto the packed dirt avenue, thinning hair blowing against his craggy cheeks and haphazard beard, Shay’s gut constricted as if a fully armed hostile had emerged. Homer wasn’t dressed in a traditional payraan tumbaan, though. Beneath his thick bulletproof vest was a black turtleneck that topped khaki pants and rugged terrain boots. He seemed a harmless cross between Gilligan’s Professor and Jeremiah Johnson. But Shay would be damned or dead if he believed that for a second.
As Homer got closer, Shay noticed more movements from the doorways of the old wood buildings. The new arrivals were a lot more what he was used to—younger men dressed in camos or black battle gear, armed and tense as hell. But closer scrutiny showed him newer details…much more revealing information. One of the men had Ghid’s missing rhino horn—sprouting from the center of his forehead. Another had bear claws in place of hands. And they all glared at him like the one guy who’d been taking a leak when the IED hit their truck.
“Shay.” Homer rushed through his last few steps before giving a hug like a doting grandfather coming to visit. The bastard smelled like one too. Old mints, bad hair gel, halitosis that gave new meaning to the term coffee breath… The list went on, but fortunately the man let him go. “Welcome back. As you can see, your brothers are happy to see you.”
Shay didn’t bother to point out the obvious, that the statement couldn’t be farther from the truth. These men felt no kinship with him, despite the fact that his side of the return-to-papa terms had been the granting of their freedom, including the deliverance of Oliver, Nika, and Damian from the Area 51 facility. But Shay didn’t blame them for being suspicious of the dream. He would be too.
“Let’s get on with it.” He didn’t bother inflecting the words one way or the other. “One way” would’ve encompassed his rage, “the other” his revulsion. Homer didn’t give a flying crap about either. “Where’s Mom?”
The words seemed to hit Homer like an insult. “Why are you being so nasty?”
Shay curled his hands into dual fists. “I didn’t know nice was part of your terms, asshole. Awww, damn.” He knocked one fist against his thigh in oh-shucks emphasis. “Guess you missed out on asking for that one. And forgive me for not floating you a freebie. When a guy knows he’s returning to the life of a goddamn lab rat, the happy dance gets scooted to the bottom of the priorities list.”
Homer expelled a long sigh, again pulling the Grandpa Joe card. “It troubles me to hear you say that.”
“Fuck. So sorry. Oh, wait. Troubling Homer. That one’s on the bottom of the list too.”
The man pushed back the graying mop of his hair before grabbing Shay by both elbows. “Don’t you understand this, Shay? Don’t you see? You’re the one, my boy—my perfect example that the serum can work without any hideous side effects. And it was because you used it as a boy. I’m certain of it!” His features turned gruel gray as anger fulminated across them. “I was certain of it all those years ago, Shay—but your mother wouldn’t listen. Even though the evidence clearly pointed to it, she refused to use children as test subjects.”
Shay glowered. “No shit. Imagine that.”
He might as well have farted for the effect it had on Homer’s royal roll. “We’re going to figure it out now, Shay—together.” He lifted a hand to Shay’s face. “You’re the key. You’re… You’re amazing.”
Shay twisted his head away. “I’m just me, damn it. And I just want to stay me, as one piece, not chopped up into tissue samples for petri dishes.”
The man rushed at him again. “That’s not your complete truth, boy, and you know it.” He seized the front of Shay’s vest in order to jerk him closer. “You’ve been wondering too, Shay. You can’t stare me straight in the face and tell me you don’t want to find out the truth about that magic pumping in your veins.”
The snakes of revulsion and rage coiled tighter together in Shay’s gut—because the fucker was right. Questions about all of this were now the subconscious demons that jolted him awake at night, the empty rooms his soul roamed in its quest toward defining who the hell he was anymore.
He’d fallen in love. And he was pretty damn certain Zoe felt the same. But had she fallen in love with him…or merely the beasts who roamed in his blood?
He needed to know…
“But not like this.” The conclusion ripped from him in a snarl as he pushed back again from Homer. “Don’t you see, Homer? We can’t do it like this!”
For one moment, just one, it seemed as if the man heard him—and understood. That was before Homer shook his head with a resigned slowness and murmured, “There is no other way, my boy. You’ll see that we’ll find the answers fast. And then t
he fun part will begin, and won’t you like that?”
The guy’s stinky grandfather bit took on a fucking creepy vibe now. Shay almost gave himself a mental cock punch to avoid the question that tumbled from him in response. “The…fun part?”
“Making your babies, of course.” Homer spread his arms, offering a full smile with it. “Your concubines will be hand-selected, of course. They’ll be tested for fertility and genetic perfection, and—”
“No.”
Homer stopped, his shock blatant. “Pardon me?”
Shay didn’t stop. He wasn’t sure he could, despite how Homer motioned forward several of his soldiers, implying the order to train their rifles at him. His mind careened, condemning himself for not foreseeing this would be Homer’s ultimate scheme, while refusing to accept it as the plan he’d even pretend to concede to.
With impeccable timing, Franzen’s bark filled the comm piece in his ear. “Good, I-Man. This is fucking good! Trip Adler up and draw out those guys from the porches. Keep it up, man.”
Not the best metaphor for the moment, but Shay sucked up courage from the boost. “No,” he declared again, meeting Homer’s glare with tight lips, drawn-back shoulders, and the hint of fight-or-flight in his stance. Homer, clearly terrified he’d opt for the latter, waved more guys off the porches and into the street. He was so consumed with corralling Shay, he left only two guards on patrol at the back of the street—who showed where their loyalties really lay by greeting Ghid with robust hugs before allowing him to swoop Mom into his arms, off to safety.
“Mama B is secure,” Ghid’s voice, gritty from the effort of holding back emotion, rasped over the comm. “Repeat, I have Mama B and she’s safe.”
Franz jumped on right after that. “Proceed to go positions. Proceed to go positions!” After a few frantic seconds, he came back on. “We need one minute, I-Man. Just one.”
A minute? Slam dunk. As long as he had Homer’s undivided attention, it was a perfect time to tell the prick exactly what he thought about this idea of the “fun stuff.”
“I’m not your superbeast sperm bank, Homer. I agreed to be the lab rat, and you need to be okay with that. You can have my blood, my hair, my tissues—make daisy chains out of my fingernails and fertilizer out of my spit for all I care—but I’m not fathering children for your personal Dr. Demento show. Don’t think I won’t lop the fucker off first, either.”
Homer’s spine straightened like a pissed cobra getting ready to strike. “Is this your way of telling me you want to go the messy way and not the civilized way?”
Shay jutted his lower lip and nodded. “Probably.”
Homer rolled his eyes before extending his arm as if pitching Shay a baseball.
No ball—at least not the stitched-seam kind. But who was he to make that assumption? For all he knew, one of the soldiers now coming at him had those goddamn black stiches hanging from his scrotum by now. These men didn’t want to be doing this shit any more than he did. As the dozen of them advanced, he confirmed his theory by directly confronting their gazes. Their rifles were raised and their feet were moving, but he was damn certain they made the charade happen only because they mentally overlaid Homer’s face atop his.
He couldn’t wait to see their reaction to the surprise Franzen was about to bring on.
“Gentlemen, that’s far enough.”
Speak of the devil, in all his awesome glory.
“You can throw the safeties on those weapons now and lay them at your feet before backing up this way,” Franz instructed. As Shay accepted his own rifle, brought over by his brother, he noticed a few of Homer’s guys visibly expel their breaths after putting down the guns.
“My, my, my. Visitors. What a surprise.” Homer cupped his hands in front of his chest Pope-style, giving off a wing nut air that wasn’t entirely out of character but still suspicious. Really suspicious. Shay eyed the guy harder. The reaction didn’t feel right. He’d expected anything from a slow seethe to a full you-took-my-toy-and-its-box tantrum—but not serenity. Not now. The man had just lost the magic key to his fucking kingdom.
“Somebody frisk Doc Asshole,” he muttered. “Now.”
As Ethan performed that duty, the pontiff-perfect smirk spread wider across Homer’s lips. “All right, so I have a confession to make. I’m not that surprised. And what a shame.” He glanced over to Franzen. “I love surprises. Don’t you?”
Franzen’s lips twisted. Shay imagined he was contemplating the perfect way to tell the guy to shut the fuck up.
He never got that chance.
The earth shook as the compound’s new lab was ripped apart by an orange and red explosion.
As he hit the deck along with Tait, Shay thought he heard his mother’s horrified scream. Or maybe it was the ringing in his ears. Or the shock in his senses. He couldn’t confirm it, because the bomb blast was followed by a firestorm he hadn’t experienced since his team last tangled with a band of pissed-off insurgents across a poppy field in the Helmand Province. He jerked his head up, half expecting to see the opposition advancing through the flowers with his head on a pike as their ultimate goal.
No flowers. No pikes. A sight much worse.
In less than a minute, the street was overrun by a small army of fighting men who looked like shiny movie extras, some running, some tumbling out of fast-moving jeeps. Every single one of them was outfitted in spanking-new mountain camos and classy black battle boots. On their heads were high-end battle helmets with GPS and heat-sensing capabilities that could see through walls.
“Start paddling, kids. We’re deep in the shit.” Franz greeted them with it as they scrambled on elbows and knees to join him, Zeke, and Dan behind a rusty horse trough.
Dan grunted. “Our buddy Homer’s been busy with his tongue on somebody’s balls.”
“Not-so-wild guess?” Tait returned. “Or am I just entertaining a wild fantasy that it’s Cameron Stock, finally within striking distance?”
Sure enough, riding shotgun in the lead jeep, was Cameron Stock.
Shay joined his brother in a dark grimace. To borrow from Homer’s knowing sarcasm, my, my, my. To borrow from himself, we should’ve fucking known.
He’d barely stabbed himself with the remorse before his attention was swerved. A second jeep sped up next to Cameron’s, making it clear that the man in that passenger’s seat was leader in equal standing with Stock. The guy, reeking of military might, was lanky, grizzled, and scowling hard beneath a black beret he wore in the Army Spec Ops style.
The moment the guy got out of the vehicle, Franz swore in what sounded like Polynesian profanity. Tait’s eyebrows kicked high, but Shay only fired back, “Who the hell is that?”
“General Kirk Newport.”
His jaw hit the dust.
“Whoa.” Zeke snarled. “The Kirk Newport? Like, the boss of our boss of our boss?”
Franzen’s burnished skin paled by at least three shades. “Yeah. That one.”
“But what’s he—”
“Damn.” Shay laid his hand over his rifle and then dropped his head to his wrists. “During the hijacking, he was the military representative who got on the line to try to talk Stock down—whatever that meant.”
Franz arched one incredulous brow. “I’ll bet that’s interesting in hindsight.”
“They talked smack to each other for a few minutes before Newport disappeared, a la your friendly car salesman going to see what he could do. It wasn’t long before he got back on the line, magically granting us clearance for the landing at Groom Lake.”
“Motherfuckers.” Zeke’s growl was strengthened by the new volley of bullets that whizzed over their heads. “The three of them have been in on this all along!”
Dan shook his head, appearing like he needed to borrow a few ashamed ice picks from Shay. “I should’ve thought things out by more steps. Should’ve predicted this.”
“Using what fucking intel?” Tait rendered a chastising whack up the side of the agent’s head. “You were
flying blind, Dan. We all were. Still are.”
Dan ignored him. “We played right into their hands,” he muttered. “They didn’t just know that we’d plan something. They were counting on it. Probably saw us jump from that damn plane. Listened to our radio chatter too. Damn it!”
Shay longed to join their rants, but there was no time. He wasn’t just the cause of this mess; he was the one who had to set it straight. Somehow…
Newport, still in his jeep, yelled into his head comm. The charge was like water to ants, making half the guerillas surge toward the old Mercantile where Ethan and Garrett were now cornered. The decrepit store was located on the same side of the street as the clinic, where the remains of Mom’s lab seemed to burn higher than ever. Shay wondered why the flames didn’t die down, seeming to whip higher and higher at the sky—
Because they were.
The wind had gusted embers from the blast across the narrow alley and onto to the roof of the Mercantile—where they caught like a match on tinder.
“Holy shit,” he gritted.
“No kidding.” Zeke put the pieces together just as he did.
“Not good,” Franz growled. “Those boys need out of there faster than bodybuilders at a romance writers’ convention.”
Shay was already halfway done scoping out the opposite side of the street. “That pile of boulders, between the saloon and the assayers… I can make it there, given proper cover. It’ll also break up the elephant, make this thing easier to chew.”
“And then what?” Franz demanded.
Shay cocked both brows. “You won’t have given half of them lead enemas by then?”
